Yesterday, I went to another photo exhibit. I feel very lucky since this is the second show in town in less than 6 months!
The exhibit is titled "2x3" and shows the works of artists from two different cities on each side of the river. Three photographers from each municipalities. This makes talking about the show a bit hard since some of the work I loved and some just let me down. What I find a bit strange is that there was only one artist who presented works that were not digitally altered...
Lets start in the order shown in the nice booklet they gave at the door.
First up is Marc Laforêt. He is a school teacher with a Masters degree... and he takes pictures of the top of the stools in his classroom. The more damaged, the better. He shoots them so you have a black background and can't see the legs. So you have a series of big disks hanging on the wall. He claims that they are a type of raw art and beautiful by themselves. He adds to them some fake stickers and fake ball point pen lines to the surface with photoshop. I just didn't get it... I even less got the 600$ he asks for each 92cm x 92cm digital print (inkjet I'm pretty sure)...
Then is Christiane Joly. She is supposed to have worked for many important photo art events (I never heard of any significant event in the surrounding 50km !). She says she's a "scannographer" as she works mainly with digital photograms. She basically puts stuff on her scanner's glass and presses the button. You can see very heavy photoshop work in her prints which are probably inkjet. She says she works on the theme of the exploration of feminity and its stagnation over the centuries... It just didn't turn me on as I couldn't figure out what the link between the objects presented was. Her 60cm x 85 cm prints go for 1100$...
Mathieu Lévesque presented stuff that was a bit more to my liking. He comes from a commercial photography background. He presented only 2 triptychs and works heavily on the meaning of things (things that sound alike). The first set was 3 very clinically photographed pictures of a fly swatter, a high heel shoe and a shirt with tie. On the second set, he took pictures of his TV set... First picture shows 4 Andy Warhol pictures, second one the words "You are target market" and the third one some guy with war paintings pointing a gun. They are quite large and could have easily been done through traditional photographic techniques. But in this case, they were inkjet prints mounted on masonite boards. The sets were quite nice and graphic but their price for inkjet prints was prohibitive at 1800$ a print (or a deal at 5000$ for the set)
Dominique Paul has a Masters from the New South Wales University and works currently on archetypes... she recycles antique mythologies and puts them in modern context. She basically always projects slides onto the human body. The recipe is always the same and she apparently does photoshop work on the images. I must say that this manipulation wasn't clearly visible, something I appreciate. I even have doubts they were fixed at all (she might say they were modified just to be "in"). The nicest ones in the show were of the goddess with multiple breast. Not that the pictures had extraordinary composition but two things struck me. First, the frames were not all square, something I didn't expect. Second, the girl pictured was quite cute (but that's probably not the art fan talking... must the testosterone
). They are color prints and go for between 1600$ and 3500$ each set.
Tristan Fortin Lebreton has a Bachelor's in photography and does traditional prints the old fashion way. The are lightly toned with selenium and are very large (93cm x 73cm). At that size, they are RC prints (pearl finish) and shown without glass to protect the mat and print... something I didn't like much as it offers no protection at all. He basically does "mechanical" effects and uses a 4x5 camera to its full potential. On one print, you can see that he used both tilt and shift in order to get a small model bridge and a real building into focus. He works on "nowhere" landscapes. The places where man has destroyed the forests in order to build things we need everyday (which he claims we don't need at all). You always see one man or a woman, doing nothing, at a place where there is nothing to do surrounded by places not designed for living. The images can be quite troubling as you wonder what the heck is going to happen... but you also know the answer: nothing. He is one who sells his prints the cheapest at 600$ each.
Last comes Gilles Prince. He won the same sponsorship twice. His work is mainly influenced by genetics and George Lucas. He creates "clones" with a serial number that starts with THX (he probably either watches too many movies or has too little imagination
). On each of the giant inkjet prints (he calls them digital prints), you can see bar codes, what is supposed to be an ovule (that looks more like a ball of granite), sine waves which go through the ear of some child like creature. The kids all have mullets and are very ugly. They are created from body parts found here and there and are genderless in their features. The problem is that he does a very poor job at covering up the photo stitching. You can see that he tried, and know that he didn't plan on you noticing. This is the series I liked the least. If anyone were to give a print to me, I wouldn't even put it in my basement closet! I would even less waste 4500$ of my hard earned cash on one of those (unless I plan on scaring people away
)
So this is pretty much the sum of it. Overall, the show was better looking than the Lettuce exhibit I went to last time. But on the technical side, it was somewhat less.
Something funny also happened while I was there. I went there in the middle of the afternoon and the lady at the Gallery turned on the lights just for me. I was the first person to visit on a nice not too cold Saturday... which can get you thinking about the state of the art world in my region...
Here are the pictures in the brochure... quick and dirty scans, in order: Laforêt, Joly, Lévesque, Paul, Fortin Lebreton, Prince
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